Of Pork And Trade

Politics: Has corruption tainted even the battle over free trade? If not, why has the White House buried its own study of a jobs "retraining" program that it insists Congress must vote for as a condition for signing three trade deals?

A Labor Department study on the effectiveness of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a $1.3 billion program for workers who claim their jobs were lost to foreign competition, has not only missed its deadline by four years, but is also being withheld until the end of the year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Based on how this White House operates, it's virtually certain they're hiding the results. Other studies show the TAA program to be a big failure. But President Obama wants Congress to pass it as a condition for his submitting the U.S. free trade treaty with South Korea to Congress for a vote. As ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."

That's worth thinking about, because right now principled Republicans, such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, are taking flak from even business groups for not going along with this pork.

Their reasons are understandable. The three stalled free trade deals — with Colombia, Panama and South Korea — will bring in $10 billion to $13 billion in sales for American producers, creating 250,000 new jobs.

The Obama administration, not so much. President Obama wants TAA to pacify unions, which vehemently oppose free trade. It doesn't hurt that 50% of TAA beneficiaries are union members, even though they make up just 6% of the private workforce.

But the $1.5 billion price tag of TAA amounts to a pretty hefty sales tax, even if the program were effective.

Problem is, it's not. That's why the Obama administration doesn't want the results to be known. It's a bad deal for workers and taxpayers, and has no place in the free trade debate. Congress will begin marking up the bill Thursday, but will use other studies to do so.

Those studies have clear conclusions.

For starters, TAA is wasteful. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., released a report earlier this year showing that the $18 billion the government already spends on job training programs are full of waste, fraud and abuse.

A 2008 American University study by Kara Reynolds and John Palatucci concluded the same, declaring TAA "of dubious value in terms of helping displaced workers find new, well-paying employment opportunities."

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